Private Firms Pour Millions into Militarizing Police via Charities

Canadian police forces have received millions of dollars from oil companies, banks and financiers, through shadowy charitable foundations that have little public oversight and increasingly serve as a “cash cow” of private money.

These police-affiliated organizations based in large cities across Canada have funded helicopters, armoured vehicles and surveillance technology for police departments, as well as many community and youth-oriented programs, according to an investigation by The Tyee.

State Theft and Police Militarization: Cops and Prosecutors Routinely Steal Cash from Poor People Accused of Crimes

In 2000, I did a survey of all police departments in Kentucky. One small finding revealed a little-known fact about the practice of civil asset forfeiture (CAF): the average dollar amount seized was only $300.00. The State seizing suspected drug dealers’ property was justified on crippling drug kingpins financially. This finding exposed a dark reality: police and prosecutors were mostly taking small amounts of cash from enormous numbers of everyday people that may or may not have committed low-level drug crimes.

America’s Blue Wall of Terror

Some of you, my beloved white friends, seem genuinely surprised that most black folk fear the police. You are shocked that we think of them as a brutalizing force. You cringe when we say they are out to do everything but serve and protect us. You think we are manufacturing stories about our bad encounters with police. You think that we must have done something wrong to provoke such remorseless cruelty.

When I was seventeen years old, I was with my brother Anthony and a childhood friend, both a year older than me, and we were stopped by four Detroit cops patrolling the neighborhood in an unmarked police vehicle. They amplified their command for us to get out of the car over their blaring megaphone. Then they approached us. One of the officers snatched me out of the backseat. We were no strangers to the menace of the police and naturally assumed the position against our car.

Militarizing Police Does Not Serve Or Protect Canadian Citizens

This week, we learned that the Toronto Police Service will be ordering C8 carbine semi-automatic assault rifles for front-line police officers.

The assault rifles, produced by arms manufacturer Colt Canada for the Canadian Forces, will cost $2,500 each, and will be in patrol cars on the streets of Canada's largest city by May. Toronto becomes only the latest municipality to acquire a weapon described on its website as "battle proven in harsh combat environments."

California Police Ransacked Public Apartments Without Warrants Under ‘Neighborhood Blitz’ Program

In an invasive, war-like operation known as the Neighborhood Blitz, police officers in Stockton, California illegally searched the apartments of poor minorities and physically disabled people, according to a class action lawsuit filed Wednesday. Under the guise of standard housing inspections, armed officers routinely burst into homes with little to no warning, ransacked the premises without warrants, demanded personal information from tenants that had nothing to do with their homes, and threatened renters with arrests and homelessness.

Oaxaca, Mexico, Faces Police Militarization as Governor Acts to Preempt Education Protests

Thousands of federal and state police troops were dispatched in mid-July to the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico to guard strategic buildings, patrol the skies and ensure that protesters cannot take over local radio stations.

The aim of this heightened police militarization? To prevent protesting teachers from exerting pressure on the administration of Gabino Cué Monteagudo, the current governor of Oaxaca, in their efforts to resist nationally imposed education reforms.

Program That Gives Military Gear To Local Police Has Serious Flaw

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Pentagon program that distributes military surplus gear to local law enforcement allows even departments that the Justice Department has censured for civil rights violations to apply for and get lethal weaponry.

That lack of communication between two Cabinet agencies adds to questions about a program under review in the aftermath of the militarized police response to protesters in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Pentagon, which provides the free surplus military equipment, says its consultation with the Justice Department will be looked at as the government reviews how to prevent high-powered weaponry from flowing to the untrustworthy.

California School Cops Received Military Rifles, Grenade Launchers, Armored Vehicles

School police in several California public school districts are ready for anything -- including, apparently, a small invasion.

The open news website MuckRock found through a recent Freedom of Information Act request that not only are California state and local police departments receiving military-grade equipment from the Department of Defense, but several school police departments are as well.

How the war on terror is killing America

If America is still the “shining city upon a hill,” that is only because of the klieg lights glinting off the razor wire. It has been 13 years since 9/11, and America is not acting like a nation that defeated Osama bin Laden. After endless bloody wars, trillions spent on security, the battering of the Constitution, and the creation of a militarized surveillance state, American citizens, at the very least, look like the losers in the war on terror.

Before the smoke cleared at the World Trade Center, President Bush launched the war in Afghanistan and followed it soon after with a second front, in Iraq. Years after becoming the longest conflicts in U.S. history, these still drag on, redefining “quagmire.” Bin Laden killed 2,996 people on Sept. 11 and in the years since, twice as many American soldiers have died responding, and a hundred times more civilians.

Canadian police agencies: Innovators in militarization?

In the wake of Ferguson's militarized policing of protests, and the White House's recent decision to review the militarization of U.S. police agencies, Canadian police spokespeople are arguing that the militarization of police is not a concern in Canada. In a recent Edmonton Journal piece Tom Stamatakis, the president of the Canadian Police Association argued that the police do not have a militaristic mindset… "Our entire approach is based upon community relations."

While there is no Department of Homeland Security program in Canada that encourages local forces to militarize, Canadian police agencies have been early adopters of less lethal weapons like pepper spray, TASERs and rubber bullets. They are first used against people within day to day policing, as we know from the events surrounding the killing of Sammy Yatim. But such tools have a tendency to slide from ordinary policing to the specialized practices of protest policing, where Canadian police have been quick to adopt.

Surplus military gear moves from battle to U.S. police forces

If the armoured personnel carriers rolling down the streets of Ferguson, Mo., this month looked as though they belonged in Iraq or Afghanistan, that’s because some of them once did.

Over the last seven years, the Pentagon says it has given police forces in St. Louis county (which includes the suburb of Ferguson) seven Humvees, three helicopters, 15 weapon-aiming sights, two night-vision devices, a cargo trailer, as well as pistols, rifles and a bomb-disposal robot.

The Militarization of Racism and Neoliberal Violence

The recent killing of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer has made visible how a kind of racist, military metaphysics now dominates American life. His subsequent demonization by the media only confirms its entrance into the public consciousness as a form of vicious entertainment. The police have been turned into soldiers who view the neighborhoods in which they operate as war zones. Outfitted with full riot gear, submachine guns, armored vehicles, and other lethal weapons imported from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, their mission is to assume battle-ready behavior. Is it any wonder that violence rather than painstaking, neighborhood police work and community outreach and engagement becomes the norm for dealing with alleged “criminals,” especially at a time when more and more behaviors are being criminalized?

SWAT-Team Nation

The moment the assault rifles surrounded her, Angie Wong was standing in a leafy art-gallery courtyard with her boyfriend, a lawyer named Paul Kaiser. It was just past 2 A.M., in May, 2008. Wong was twenty-two years old and was dressed for an evening out, in crisp white jeans, a white top, and tall heels that made it difficult not to wobble. The couple had stopped by a regular event hosted by the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID), a red brick gallery with the aim of “turning Detroit into a model city,” and arrived to find a tipsy, jubilant scene: inside, gallerygoers were looking at art and dancing to a d.j.; outside, on the patio, several young women were goofily belting out the lyrics to “Hakuna Matata,” from “The Lion King”:

Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase.
It means no worries for the rest of your days.
It’s our problem-free philosophy. Hakuna Matata!

The World’s Most Repressive Regimes Delight In U.S. Crack Down In Ferguson

After years of being critiqued for its own crackdowns against dissidents, China has begun to use the ongoing clashes between police and protesters and police in Ferguson, MO as a way to lambaste the United States for hypocrisy, joining other repressive regimes in expressing no small amount of schadenfreude at the current situation.

The Chinese government either directly owns or oversees all media within the country, including the Xinhua news service. As such, the op-ed published on Monday from commentator Li Li can be read as being an unofficial statement from Beijing. In the article, Li takes the United States to task for not yet realizing Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream, noting that “despite the progress, racial divide still remains a deeply-rooted chronic disease that keeps tearing U.S. society apart, just as manifested by the latest racial riot in Missouri.”

How the Defense Industry Convinced Congress to Militarize Local Cops

The Ferguson, Missouri, police department's display of armored cars, officers in riot gear, and assault rifles over the past week shocked Americans who didn't realize how much military equipment is now available to local police departments. But since the 1990's, more than 8,000 federal, state, tribal, and local police agencies across the country have armed themselves with the military's excess gear, free of charge. The inventory includes everything from office furniture and first aid kits to aircraft, armored cars, rifles and bayonets, according to the Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of Defense office that manages the transactions under an initiative called Program 1033.

In June, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) introduced an amendment to de-fund aspects of the program. Grayson's bill would have exempted certain military equipment, including planes and armored cars, from Program 1033. That effort failed; just 62 members of the House of Representatives voted for the measure, with 355 voting no. Maybe the outcome shouldn't have been a surprise: According to a new analysis of campaign finance data, the politicians who voted against Grayson's bill received, on average, 73 percent more campaign donations from defense industry sources from 2011 through 2013 than their peers who voted for it.

The analysis—conducted by the Berkeley-based research group MapLight using data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics—also found that of 59 representatives who received more than $100,000 from the defense industry from 2011 through 2013, all but four voted against the amendment.

Original Article
Source: motherjones.com/
Author: By Alex Park

Police In Ferguson Let High-Profile Journalists Go While Charging Regular Folks With Crimes

WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday night, reporters from The Huffington Post and The Washington Post made national news when police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, assaulted and arrested them for not obeying orders quickly enough. Outrage, a demand for answers and calls for press freedom grew as word of what happened spread on social media. Shortly thereafter, the two men were released, in part, it seemed, due to their high-profile status.

Here's How Lawmakers Use The War On Terror To Defend Police Militarization

WASHINGTON -- Local police forces need military equipment to fight terrorism, members of Congress argued in June when they successfully beat back legislation that would have restricted the Defense Department's ability to transfer such weaponry to police departments.

During a late-night debate on an annual defense appropriations bill, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) tried to attach an amendment to demilitarize the police. Specifically, his measure would have blocked a Defense Department program that provides surplus military equipment -- Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and M16 assault rifles, among other things -- to local law enforcement, free of charge.

The Economics of Police Militarism

Two crucial battles broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, this week. The first began with the public airing of sorrow and rage after the death of the eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot by a police officer, on Canfield Court, in the St. Louis suburb, at 2:15 P.M. last Saturday. Then came the local law enforcement’s rejoinder to the early round of protests. Officers rolled in with a fleet of armored vehicles, sniper rifles, and tear-gas cannisters, reinserting the phrase “the militarization of policing” into the collective conscience. The tactical missteps by the town’s police leadership have been a thing to behold. (They’re also to be expected; anyone doubting as much should pick up Radley Balko’s “The Rise of the Warrior Cop.”)

Cops Should Be Cops—Not Combat Troops

By now, you may well have seen the video of heavily armed cops in Ferguson, Missouri, apparently firing tear gas at a film crew from Al Jazeera America and sending the journalists fleeing. Coming on top of the arrest of two reporters, one from the Washington Post and the other from the Huffington Post, it’s yet another stain on the reputation of the St. Louis police, which has been struggling to handle the protests that have followed the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teen-ager.

My colleagues Jelani Cobb, who is in Ferguson, Amy Davidson, and Jay Caspian Kang have done excellent jobs of covering the fatal police shooting and its aftermath. The teargassing incident was so gratuitous, however, that it demands an additional comment.

Ferguson Protests Met With Heavy Police Response, 2 Reporters And Alderman Arrested

Police violence broke out again in Ferguson, Missouri, Wednesday night, as the streets filled with tear gas, rubber bullets, heavily-armed SWAT teams and mine-resistant vehicles on the fourth night of unrest since Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was shot to death by police on Aug. 9.

Mostly peaceful protesters in the St. Louis suburb, symbolically holding their hands in the air, were met with tear gas and smoke bombs fired so regularly that several reporters on scene noted it was hard to breathe. "Shit, shit," shouted msnbc.com's Trymaine Lee, as his network attempted to reach him amid an onslaught late in the evening. Stun grenades were fired, and police wearing camouflage fatigues and riot gear formed lines in the streets.